Title: "It Happened One Night"
Author: brokenheartedshipper/Dori/janeausten4ever/me
Characters, Pairings: Amy, Eleven, Amy/Eleven, Rory, River, random unimportant OCs
Summary: It was Rory's mum's birthday and Amy didn't want to go, and nefarious alien mean girls were involved, and he was the Doctor and she was Amy Pond and so it happened. A songfic for "E.T." by Katy Perry.
Warnings: Adult content.
Rating: A mild M for some sexuality.
Notes: Could be set quite anytime. There is a reference that would suggest it's post-"The Wedding of River-Song," but certain lighthearted behavior might suggest otherwise. Whatever floats your boat! Lyrics not in order.

*/*

Take me, take me/
Wanna be a victim/
Ready for abduction

*/*

"It's my mum's birthday," Rory said, and so it happened.

The Doctor looked him over with a searching gaze, and then responded politely with, "Yes?"

Rory gave his wife and his friend a disbelieving look. "So…" he explained, understandably baffled as to his comrades' ignorance of common familial obligations. "…I've got to go and see her! To celebrate!" He raised his eyebrows to denote Duh and brought his palms up for a halfway-shrug.

"All right then," the Doctor replied, flashing Amy a what're-you-gonna-do face, and he shrugged, bit off a large chunk of the plum he was holding, and pulled a lever. "Whatever you say, Roranicus. We'll just drop you off then, and pick you up four or five hours later, eh?"

Rory looked over at Amy expectantly. "You're note coming?" he finally deduced, incredulous.

Amy looked up defensively from her self-manicuring session in the corner. "It's your mum, not mine!" she exclaimed. "Besides, she never liked me anyway," Amy huffed.

"That's because you came downstairs for breakfast in your underwear," Rory explained through gritted teeth. "When we were seventeen! My dad nearly had a stroke. Not to mention all those times before we were dating when you used our backyard as a rendezvous spot for all those boyfriends of yours, a new one every week, and Mum caught you about seven times—"

"Oh, shush," Amy interrupted, waving a hand at him across the room to shut him up (she then promptly inspected her viridian nails for any air damage). "All the more reason for me not to go!"

"She's your mother-in-law, Amy, you've got to at least be nice!"

"Oi! I'm his mother-in-law, when's he ever nice to me?" Amy snapped, gesturing to the Doctor at the console, who instantly threw his hands up in surrender.

"Now now, don't bring me into this!" he squeaked.

"You shut up," Amy instructed hastily.

"Right," acquiesced the Doctor.

"The point is," said Amy, "I'm not going to your mum's bloody birthday party. She can manage a few hours without me; tell her I'm sick."

Rory sighed, knowing that since it was Amy, the battle was lost.

"Fine," he said, and so it happened.

*/*

This is transcendental/
On another level

*/*

It was different, Amy thought, than anything she'd done with all the predecessors. Even minus all the extra baggage, the emotions and the angst and the complications and the nostalgia—oh God, the nostalgia—take away all that, and it was still different, different physically. It was…rawer. More pure, more vivid, like all the sensations were shooting straight through her like a lightning bolt, down her spine, through her veins, rolling across her whole body and crashing into her fingers and toes like the crest of a wave. Usually, she felt this sort of…fog, a haze around her while it was happening, one she had to work and sweat and push through to reach that final crest, and even then, the crest felt murky.

But not that time. No, not that time.

*/*

You're from a whole other world/
A different dimension

*/*

"So," the Doctor had said, rubbing his hands together as he finished the last of his plum. "Would you like to know where we are?"

Amy grinned at him and shook her head a little bit as they stepped out of the Tardis. "As a matter of fact, I would."

"We are on the planet Alpha Cum Laude," he informed her with pride.

"Huh," she answered. "That's an interesting name for a planet."

"It is indeed," the Doctor concurred. "Now if I'm not mistaken, it is currently the month of Montegra here—May, I suppose you would call it—and that means a portion of the inhabitants are in a period of segregation."

"They're in a period of what?"

"Segregation of the Sexes—SOTS, I believe they call it. It's mainly for the youths. I don't think they separate anyone over the age of twenty-four, as that's the maximum childbearing age for their species."

"Ah."

"Yes, 'ah.' The females can't reproduce unless they inhabit the same space for about a month. It helps along their fertility somehow, I think."

"I see," said Amy, stepping over a boulder-sized lump of what appeared to be pure, untarnished crystal. Apparently it wasn't so valuable on Alpha Cum Laude. "And what do they do in these…fertility houses?"

The Doctor frowned ponderously, pushing out his lower lip. He brought a hand up to stroke his chin like a wise college professor. "I'm not sure! Games, drills, initiation, I suppose, for the eighteen-year-olds—those are the young'uns, you see."

"Mm-hm," said Amy, nodding her head knowledgably. "So it's basically like a great big sorority house!"

"What? No! No-no-no-no! Not at all," the Doctor insisted, waving his hands about erratically. "It's not as sisterly, not as friendly, it's more like a…a…"

"Great big house full of mean, catty, back-stabbing bitches? Yeah, basically a sorority. I can do that!" Amy beamed.

"Oh no. Oh, no no no no no no no," the Doctor forbade. "We are not having you put into danger, getting you in over your head in a house full of conniving, sinister, evil genius aliens, just so you can stir up some trouble for me to solve! Absolutely not!"

Amy leaned up close to him, face scrunched up in dedication. "Oh, please? Pleeeease please please please?"

"No! No."

Amy pushed out her lower lip, a cruelly effective strategy. "Pwease?"

The Doctor stared at her, lips pursed, but did not answer.

Amy laced her fingers together under her chin and looked up at him like a puppy dog. The kill strike.

"Please?"

The Doctor stood, trembling slightly, his eyes unwillingly glued to Amy's pleading face. He pressed his lips closer and closer together, as though he was attempting to stop his body from spitting out the words.

"—d'oh, all right!" he blurted, exceedingly irritated.

"Ooh, thank you thank you thank you thank you!" Amy said, clapping her hands together rapidly and leaping up and down.

"Let's go then," the Doctor beckoned grudgingly as he began climbing up a wall of solid diamond.

Amy grinned triumphantly, and so it happened.

*/*

Your touch magnetizing/
Feels like I am floating, leaves my body glowing

*/*

Amy didn't remember much about their surroundings, seeing as she'd been…a bit distracted, but one thing she could recall was the jewels. Amethysts, he'd said they were—they'd been sparkling like lavender stars, and she meant "sparkling" in the purest sense of the word, lights switching on and off with every angle. She hadn't been watching them intently—more just out of the corner of her eye—but she remembered it'd felt like the two of them were freefalling through space, the bright lilac of the stars fading and alighting around them.

All the leaves and branches and wildlife that grew inside that cave—it hadn't felt like a cave at all. It felt more like a slice of the jungle, cut out from Earth with a pie server and plopped onto the Alpha Cum Laude plate. But with added exotics. The colors there seeped through the darkness and into her blood. She could smell them, the reds and golds and so many greens, with every catching breath she drew.

It had been cold in the cave, she remembered.

But not for long.

*/*

Boy, you're an alien/Your touch so foreign
It's supernatural/Extraterrestrial

*/*

The city of Elandria was unlike anything Amy had ever seen before (though that was a phrase she supposed she had to stop using so often, as it was generally assumed to apply almost all the time now). Everything was built with thick glass cubes, only it wasn't glass, the Doctor said, it just looked like glass, but was much stronger. ("So it's Plexiglas," said Amy, to which the Doctor fumbled and stuttered for an argument). You could see right into where all the workers were working in their multiple-cubicle-buildings.

"What are they doing?" Amy wondered as they passed by a skyscraper (literally—it extended to the tip of the atmosphere, the Doctor said, and was protected from combustion by blah blah blah yada yada yada science stuff).

"They're organizing ideas," answered the Doctor, and they stopped to look in at one of the humanoid women who was reaching out with her finger, dragging what looked like computer files projected into mid-air, from one side of the board to another, as her co-workers sat and watched, their own projections laid out in front of them.

"Each worker controls what appears on their projection, and when they want to send an idea or thought to someone else they transfer it to that person's projection. The leader organizes everyone's thoughts into an intelligible order. It's very efficient. At five o' clock they all turn off their projections and go home to their families."

"Wow," Amy marveled. "What sort of thoughts are they organizing?"

"Well, this here is a mud merchant business," the Doctor replied. "They're calculating the annual figures, I think."

"What?" said Amy as she turned to him, flabbergasted. "You're saying crystals and diamonds are growing about like trees everywhere while mud is precious?"

"Quite so," the Doctor confirmed, rocking back and forth on his heels and nodding matter-of-factly at her. "But they don't grow everywhere. As you'll notice, we landed in the countryside of sorts, whereas this—" He gestured around them "—is fairly metropolitan."

"Trust me, I bloody well noticed," Amy grumbled. "Had to walk nearly five hundred miles, then about five hundred more, now didn't I?"

"Oh, hush," the Doctor scolded.

They walked on, and as Amy passed the various cityfolk and glanced into the many Plexiglas buildings, she noticed there appeared to be no one between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four wandering about.

"Doctor," she posed, "this is pretty metropolitan—where are the mean girl houses you talked about, with all the youngsters?" She nudged him with her hip, a playful smile on her lips.

"They're east of town," the Doctor responded, "in another part of the countryside." He pretended to be interested in a triangular aircraft passing overhead, so as to avoid meeting her gaze.

Amy immediately stopped walking, and she slapped her hands onto her hips. After realizing Amy was no longer beside him, the Doctor twirled about in search of her, and then finally discovered her in the unpredictable spot of four paces behind him. He put on his innocent face.

"What?" he asked 'cluelessly,' and Amy raised one eyebrow.

"East's that way, isn't it," she deadpanned, pointing in the opposite direction.

The Doctor winced.

Amy groaned and marched toward him. "C'mon, you," she ordered, seizing his wrist, and so it happened.

*/*

Wanna feel your powers/Stun me with your lasers
Your kiss is cosmic/Every move is magic

*/*

She remembered at one point she'd laid her head back with a heavy sigh to rest on the foliage there, and it'd bumped against something hard. She remembered that thought, that realization passing through her head—Oh, I've just hit something hard, it's rather uncomfortable—and then she cannot recall anything else about that rock.

Which doesn't make sense, when you think about it, because, with the natural unfolding of events, there'd been some recurrent backwards movement, which meant that rock had been digging into her head, and then her neck, and then her back, repetitively, for, well, a long time. And she hadn't even noticed. Hadn't paid any attention at all. Wasn't even the slightest bit concerned with it.

She supposed she'd been otherwise engaged.

*/*

Boy, you're my lucky star

*/*

They reached the compound of sorts at around dinnertime.

It looked almost exactly like a college campus, only instead of boulders on the lawn there were chunks of precious jewel, and instead of oak trees there were giant tree-sized geraniums with five gargantuan leaves blooming out of their stems. Plus all the buildings were glass, not brick.

"Wow," said Amy by way of first impression. "This is…odd. Why is such a technologically advanced society still doing something like…this?" She waved her arms around the campus as though strange, hostile happenings were going on right before their eyes.

"I could ask you the very same thing," the Doctor answered with a wise glance her way. "Why do humans continue to wear hats long after their original purpose is proven unnecessary? Tradition. Only here, the purpose isn't unnecessary at all—it's imperative to the continuation of the Alpha Cum Laude race."

"Yes, but why keep them out here in the country, secluded in much less up-to-date facilities?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Why does the Sistine Chapel still stand?"

"All right, all right, I get you…"

The pair continued on their way, passing by a long, narrow building with many men and women in evening gowns and tuxedoes rushing around inside.

"Who're they?" Amy wanted to know, pointing in disbelief. "The ones in the fancy clothes?"

"Those're the nurses," the Doctor said. "That's what they wear here."

"And who're the ones in the pajamas?" Amy prodded.

The Doctor smiled a little bit. "Those would be the doctors. Nurses are higher-ranked over here."

Amy shoved him in mock disbelief.

"Get out!" she exclaimed, mouth agape.

"No thank you," said the Doctor, confused.

Amy smiled, crossing her arms over her chest and nodding approvingly. "Wow," she said, "Rory'd like it here."

The Doctor looked at her as she watched the doctors and much-higher-paid nurses shuffling about urgently inside the glass walls of the hospital. She was smiling, but the Doctor wouldn't have called it a smile. He didn't think there was a word in any language for the look on her face. (Except Gallifreyan. There was a word for everything in Gallifreyan.)

"Yes," he agreed, resignedly. "He would."

After a few moments of contemplation, Amy began walking again, and the Doctor followed closely behind, hands in pockets as he observed her carefully for any sign of doubt—but she seemed to have decided to return to her former self.

She led him into the Main Hall, where a plump, grumpy-looking gray-haired woman sat behind an enormous desk.

"Let me do the talking," the Doctor warned hastily before stepping right up to the desk with a bright smile, dragging Amy by her elbow.

"Hello!" he greeted cheerfully. "This here is my sister; we've just moved here from Kalpormalopolis and she'll be needing a room to stay in for the Segregation Period."

"There are no single rooms left available, she'll have to share," recited Mrs. Grumpy-pants flatly. "You're lucky we even have any spots left at all—you're late by two days."

"Yes, well, we've come a long way from…Kalpormopolis."

"Kalpormalopolis," Amy corrected.

"Yes, that," said the Doctor.

The lady obviously had no interest whatsoever in their origins—or in anything, for that matter—and she handed them a key expressionlessly.

"Building try/bly/ny, room sec-tec-dec. Enjoy your SOTS."

"Yes, thank you!" the Doctor beamed, flipping the key up into the air and then catching it again. "We'll be out of your hair, then!"

"You will be escorted off the premises immediately," said Mrs. Grumpy-pants blankly.

The Doctor's face froze, and Amy's eyes widened to near Dobby-ish proportions. "I—I'm sorry, what?"

"You have already broken protocol by entering this facility," Mrs. Grumpy-pants explained in a bored-to-death tone. "Guards have been summoned to escort you off the premises. You may return at the end of the month to retrieve your…sister."

Two bulky men in black were now emerging briskly from the hallway. They quickly seized the Doctor and pushed through the doors with their massive shoulders.

Amy looked panic-stricken as the Doctor was carried away from her by his elbows, his feet scrambling to make contact with the ground a foot beneath him.

"Doctor!" she cried out, 85% desperate for his release and 15% trying to hold back a laugh at the sight of his skinny body attempting to wriggle free of the guards.

"I'll come back for you, Amy!" he declared heroically, and Amy covered her mouth with her hands to hide a giggle.

And so it happened.

*/*

Infect me with your love and/
Fill me with your poison

*/*

Amy hadn't expected it to be…well, the way it was. And let's face it, she'd been expecting something.

At first, she'd only been imagining what it would be. For a long time, that's all she thought she was doing: imagining. Playing with ideas. Thinking. And that was harmless, surely.

She'd expected something for a while, a long time ago, but she'd thought those days were gone, filled up with roadblocks and complications. And she was fine with that, good with that, great with that!

But the truth was, after everything, everything that'd happened, everything that had come between them—and that was lot, it was a goddamn lot—she still hadn't stopped expecting it. Imagining it, certainly—that much, she'd long since realized she'd never rid herself of.

But she hadn't expected to still be expecting. If that made any sense (which it didn't)…She hadn't expected that moment of, "Oh! So this is what it's like!" Like it was supposed to happen all along.

Maybe it was.

*/*

You're so supersonic

*/*

Escape was simpler than usual. Amy simply had to manipulate the guard into letting her out for a "midnight snack" (by "manipulate," she meant, "quickly snog." She figured it was allowed if it was for the sake of her survival).

She met the Doctor in the shrubbery outside her building. She'd been counting on him to get back inside, and he'd been counting on her to get back outside. The rest they'd have to figure out together.

"Well that idea of yours didn't work out so well," hissed the Doctor. "I had to take samples of the outer walls and bring them all the way back to the Tardis for analysis, then sonic myself about twelve separate times for immunity to the alarm system, then set up our hideout in the forest, then come all the way back to sneak past all the guards roaming about!" On 'about,' he accidentally spat on her cheek, and Amy grimaced and wiped it off irritatedly. Oblivious to his social faux paus, the Doctor sighed exasperatedly and looked around for signs of guard activity. "What'd you have to do?"

"What? Oh, um, nothing," Amy said hurriedly.

"What d'you mean, 'nothing?'" the Doctor hissed angrily.

"I mean…nothing!" Amy insisted, flashing him a don't-you-dare-push-me look.

"Well that is obviously untrue, as you can't possibly have done nothing and successfully escaped this high-security facility!" spat the Doctor.

"I'm telling you I did nothing!"

"And I'm telling you I don't believe you!"

"Hey! Who's over there?" called an alarmingly loud, gruff voice.

"Sh-sh!"

"…What was that?"

"They heard you, I think."

"Don't you start with the 'they heard you!' You were the one who was all—"

"Oi! Who goes there?"

"…Amy?"

"What?"

"Run!"

And so it happened.

*/*

You're so hypnotizing/
Could you be the devil? Could you be an angel?

*/*

Of course she thought of Rory. Of course she did. Any way it happened, she would always be thinking of Rory. And River, too.

Not that they were exactly at the forefront of her mind—no, no—she knew how to push thoughts away, lock them down, refuse to acknowledge them—she'd been doing it for months now, hadn't she? The fear, the guilt, the pain, the angst, the ache, the need, the reality—everything that hurt, she learned to push away.

The Doctor mentioned something along those lines at a later date. "Humans," he said, and he glanced her way. "You never think about what you don't want to think about."

But Amy doesn't think it's just humans.

*/*

Kiss me, kiss me

*/*

They were both giggling as he led her into the brush, his hand on the small of her back and the moon lighting their path.

"So?" he said a few moments of subsiding laughter later. "Was it all that you'd hoped for, those five or six hours?"

Amy nodded appraisingly. "More or less."

"Were the girls as mean as you'd hoped?"

"Oh, quite. Pure evil, they were."

"Yeah?"

"Oh, definitely. There was this girl Mischka, and back in Elandria she has this bloke Forsyth, but this other girl Lymlen claims Mischka stole him from her, so she—Lymlen, that is—was spreading all these rumors about Mischka, saying her mud-ring wasn't actually made of mud, it was synthesized mud, so we all had to pick sides."

"I see," said the Doctor. "So did it all amount to a grand showdown?"

Amy looked at him, in awe of his ignorance. "Of course not!" she proclaimed. "Are you stupid? Mischka and Lymlen are best friends, they'd never hurt each other! Geez…" Amy shook her head. The Doctor obviously had not seen Mean Girls. She'd have to take care of that.

Bemused, the Doctor held aside some errant ferns for Amy to pass through. As she swept by him, he couldn't help but notice that her hair took on a certain sheen in the moonlight, a kind of silver-lined auburn he couldn't describe. It caught him by surprise, and he had to hold down the physical impulse bubbling up into his throat to reach out and touch it.

"You coming, Doctor?" said Amy, and she turned around.

"…Yes, yes, of course, I'm coming, I just got…distracted." As he reached her side, Amy watched him out of the corner of her eye, a tiny smile playing across her lips. He was bumbling again. He hadn't bumbled in a while. Amy wished he'd bumble more often. She missed his bumbling.

And so it happened.

*/*

I wanna walk on your wavelength/And be there when you vibrate/
For you, I'll risk it all

*/*

"Doctor?"

"Hm…"

"Are you asleep?"

"No, but you certainly should be, Pond. We've a long way to walk back to the Tardis in the morning, you should get your rest."

"I know, but…I was just wondering…d'you miss me?"

"But you're right here."

"Yes, no, I mean…d'you miss…d'you miss when I was yours?"

"…You were never mine, Pond. You should know that by now."

"Yes I was. I was…! Sometimes…sometimes I wish I still was….D'you?"

"…I always wish I could hold them in the palm of my hand, cradle them in my arms, protect them, keep them close and safe and with me forever. What I've failed to realize is that with me is the least safe place of all."

"…"

"So to answer your question…every day, Amelia. Every day."

She touches him then, his arm, and fire sears through them and the fire is fear and the fire is guilt, and it is pain and angst and ache and nostalgia and need—the fire is need.

And so it happened.

*/*

You open my eyes/
And I'm ready to go, lead me into the light

*/*

They are lips and teeth and tongue, faces melded together, DNA intertwining.

They are the feel of his long, clumsy fingers, not so clumsy anymore, curling around her pale hip with a firm grasp, and her fingers on the back of his neck, tiny hairs rising to meet her touch.

They are two chests pressed together, and Amy thinks it's so silly how people get caught up in that phrase 'two hearts beating as one,' because this—this is so much better, three heartbeats, wild and erratic, reverberating between their two bodies like physical strokes of a drum.

They are the lines of his face in the pearly moonlight, his cheeks and nose and forehead ivory between the shadows; one lock of hair falls onto his forehead, and Amy feels an inexplicable surge of want from this, like she should run her fingers through it, cling to it, yank it—and they are the smooth milkiness of the backs of her legs, the enthralling curve of thigh to calf, that the Doctor can't stop tracing his hands across, over and over and over again.

They are her gasp and his choked catching breath as he breaches the gap.

They are the fear and the guilt, the pain and the angst, the ache and the need—and the nostalgia. They are the nostalgia.

They are Amy Pond and the Doctor. They are the fire, and it will burn.

It will burn and it will tear apart and it will hurt—but it doesn't matter, it really doesn't matter in the end, because they've learned not to think about it.

*/*

They say be afraid/You're not like the others, futuristic lover
Different DNA/They don't understand you

*/*

"Did you and the Doctor ever…you know…" Of all the questions in the world, this is the one to which River must know the answer.

Amy's old, and she's tired, and it's been such a long time…but she hasn't forgotten. The fire, you see. It never did stop burning.

"It's all right, Mum…You can tell me, I won't be mad…I of all people understand," Amy's daughter was saying, as she patted her arm.

So Amy tells the story, from beginning to end. "…And so it happened," she says.

"And so it did," says River.

THE END

A/N: Can't believe I was actually inspired by Katy Perry of all people. What the hell is wrong with me? Anyway, reviews are lovely as per usual!